Crizzo wrote:Strong/bold do not only change the look, but give more weight to the word.

hanakin wrote:Crizzo is correct semantics of the tag matter for SEO.

We know it. That what we say since the beginning.

Bold => Text format.

Strong => Give weight to the word.

We all agree about this point.

Our disagreement is the fact that you definitely want to use BBCode b as a semantic tag for SEO, and we think this is the wrong way.
So if you really want a BBcode to "hightlight" words in a post, why don't fix it by creating separate BBcode?
One for the text format (bold) and one for SEO (strong).
Doing this makes more sense than using the b BBcode as a semantic tag for SEO, and we will match with the HTML usage (eg: http://www.html-5-tutorial.com/strong-a ... ements.htm)

All that is important is usually displayed in bold and/or underlined but all that is in bold is not systematically important. You can use bold to highlight a word but that's not why it should be considered as really important, especially for screen readers (accessibility) and search engines (SEO).

w3c wrote:The b element represents a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, actionable words in interactive text-driven software, or an article lede.

The usage is just fine too. Using span tags would be wrong. There is only a case for using b and i instead of strong and em, both of which are splitting hairs.

We are forum software. We can not predict what a user will be using bold or italics for in the context of their posts, ie: to enhance styling or to convey meaning.

However, strong is semantic and describes the text it surrounds as having more meaning (just as em is used to describe more emphasis). Semantics are important as this can affect, for example, accessibility and disabled people who use other means to experience the web. A blind person's web browser will handle the strong tag, and convey the added strength of the text to the reader...it might not handle the b tag, a span tag or CSS.

I am not arguing anything about the fact that there are issues. I am simply saying that we will be keeping the strong element and the em element. This is not likely to ever change as its more semantic. I have yet to see a compelling use case for why you would ever want something to be bold but not weighted. There is no disadvantage to weighting something when its bold unless you do not understand the concept of what bold means. Quoting w3c does nothing for your sake as the b & i elements are not really used anymore. The descriptions they are using are an attempt to redefine them.

As for the other issues and these are seperate issue of what is getting returned, bottom line its not an issue with the html or css, but rather the template engine itself possibly this line

Which basically checks if it has set the template values from the file and if not it uses the hardcoded function. It maybe there is no call to load the template file for bbcodes when using codes outside of a post. Therefore according to this line it would use the hard coded function.

This functionality definitely needs tweaked in light of a two location of bbcodes (DB & HTML file) as opposed to this extra function.